Media Accessibility for Deaf and Blind Audiences

The concept of accessibility has emerged as a cornerstone in the modern drive for inclusivity, transforming barriers into bridges and fostering a more equitable society. Whether in audiovisual media, museums, or even the fashion industry, the goal is to ensure that people with disabilities can fully engage with and enjoy diverse cultural, educational, and entertainment experiences. Media accessibility services such as Subtitling for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (SDH), Live Subtitling (LS), and Audio Description (SD) have proven essential for enabling diverse audiences to enjoy movies, television programs, live events, and more. Similarly, museums have embraced accessibility to ensure exhibits can be experienced by all visitors, incorporating features like tactile displays or musical ekphrases for blind patrons, and live or pre-recorded subtitling services for those with hearing loss. Even sectors like the fashion industry have begun to prioritise accessibility, definitively proving that it is not an obstacle to creativity, contrary to longstanding misconceptions. This widespread adoption of accessibility has been driven by both technological advancements and changing societal attitudes across European countries. Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, and Augmented Reality have contributed to making accessibility tools more sophisticated and user-friendly. At the same time, legal frameworks such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the upcoming European Accessibility Act have reinforced the need for inclusivity in both public and private sectors, thus helping raising awareness in the field. Despite these advances, challenges remain. Accessibility is often unevenly distributed across regions and industries, with some sectors and countries outpacing others. In Audiovisual Translation Studies, the field has evolved from the exploratory works on media accessibility in the early 2000s to the consolidated standards of the 2010s, with current trends increasingly focusing on the detailed, specific needs of specific users of specific services within specific fields. As this volume demonstrates, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for accessibility, due to the diverse cultural, linguistic, and technological contexts it must address. By gathering voices from such various landscapes, this volume provides a multifaceted exploration of both the universal principles and the local specificities of accessibility services applied to media, arts, and everyday life. It is divided into three thematic sections, featuring 11 double-blind peer-reviewed articles, stemming from contributions to the International Conference on Accessible Intersemiotic Translation (ICAIT), held in Parma on 31 March and 1 April 2022.